A hand patted Winceworth’s shoulder and he fully jumped in his chair.
‘Quite the party last night, hah!’
Winceworth looked from the hand to the face peering at him. While working at Swansby’s, he had made a conscious effort not to make a taxonomy of his fellow workers. Even a private cataloguing (Bielefeld: carafe; Appleton: cafetière) seemed unfair, dehumanising even, but so many figures just slipped into set types. Without wanting to stereotype or acknowledge cliché, therefore, Winceworth knew that the person blinking breezily down at him was an Anglo-Saxon scholar. This specific species within the Swansby’s stable of lexicographers all seemed to be half-composed of clouds. White clouds on top of their heads and white clouds on their chins – their eyes were cloudy and their breath was somehow warmer and heavier than anyone else’s when they leaned in too close to speak. They always did lean in too close as if nudged forward by an unseen crosswind, and seemed to take up a lot of room whenever they moved, always choosing to walk in the centre of a corridor or channel between desks rather than stepping to one side. It was a gentle filling of space, not an aggressive one. The Anglo-Saxon scholars wafted rather than surged or marched.
They spoke softly with lumpy, lilting vowels. This one was no exception.
‘The party,’ Winceworth repeated. ‘Last night? Yes, quite a party, that party.’
The cloud nodded, smiled, puffed away.
The content and extent of Winceworth’s conversations within the domed hall generally fell into certain patterns. For example, the puff-bearded genius behind Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary, Prof. Gerolf Swansby, always said, ‘Good morning, Winceworth!’ when he passed Winceworth’s desk before lunch. Always the same intonation and word order. There was a boy, Edmund, employed to distribute packets of letters and documents. Whenever he came by, his wicker barrow wheedling a note beneath the breath of its wheel, Edmund’s cry of ‘There’s your lot!’ always prompted a ‘Let’s see what we have here then!’ The same inflection each time, the same pitch and register and volume.
On the rare occasion that a colleague approached Winceworth’s desk to comment on the weather or the cricket score or some minor matter of politics, they never seemed to come to him with queries. No one ever spoke to him expecting to receive a certain, specific answer.
Winceworth wondered how they all stereotyped him. A piece of the furniture. A lisping feature of decorum.
Edmund the barrow boy was approaching now, and sure enough—
‘There’s your lot!’ came the call as papers and letters smacked onto Winceworth’s desk. He jumped again, despite himself, at the impact.
‘Ah! Let’s see—’ The words sprang automatically to his lips. His eyes moved to the back of the departing cloud. ‘See what—’ he continued, and his voice had a distinct waver to it, still faintly whiskied from the night before.
The boy was already moving on to the next desk and reaching into the basket for Appleton’s papers.
‘There’s your lot!’ said the boy to Appleton.
‘Thank you ever so much,’ Winceworth mouthed to no one in particular.
‘Thank you ever so much!’ said the lexicographer, taking up the papers.
The system for the day was simple: Winceworth received various words, and sources for their definitions, from the public each day, which he would sift and assess and annotate. When he was ready to draft a final definition for a word, he would write it with his regulation Swansby pen on one of the powder-blue index cards stacked in front of him. These cards would be collected by Edmund at the end of every day and he would slot them in the alphabeticised pigeonholes lining the Scrivenery. There, the words were ready to be added to the Dictionary proofs.
Appleton caught his eye. ‘Did you make it home last night, Winceworth? You look a little grey about the gills.’
‘Yes. Yes, wasn’t it?’ Winceworth said. As expected, Appleton completely ignored him.
‘Must say, my head was quite the belfry first thing. Who knew selling rhubarb jam would keep Frasham’s family in quite such a fine line of cognacs?’
‘Wasn’t it,’ said Winceworth again. And then, once more, grist for the mill, ‘Yes?’
‘Still,’ said Appleton. He dug his paper knife into the envelopes strewn across his desk. ‘Good to meet the happy couple at last.’
Winceworth blinked. A memory of the previous evening surfaced.
Bielefeld chipped in, ‘Frasham mentioned her in his letters back, had he not?’
Appleton’s head angled towards Frasham’s empty desk, the only one on the Scrivenery floor apparently free from paper and index cards. Instead it was feathered along the fringes with pinned photographs and mementoes sent back from his travels.
‘No, he didn’t,’ Winceworth said. ‘Not once.’
‘And so good to have Terence back in the country, too, where we can keep an eye on him,’ said Appleton.
‘Entirely awful,’ Winceworth said.
‘Been too long, far too long; wondering about him and his silent Glossop shadow trudging across God knows where doing God knows what.’
‘Aubergine,’ Winceworth contributed.
Appleton’s expression didn’t flicker. ‘But yesterday was far too busy to get a proper word with him; I shall have to grab him by the sleeve the next time he dares show his face around the door. Did you see him with the balalaika: what a thing! Wonderful man. But!’ Appleton stretched and wiggled his shoulders. ‘To the task in hand!’ He met Winceworth’s gaze again. Winceworth smiled blankly. ‘Did you say anything, just then?’
‘No?’
‘Just so,’ said Appleton. He had the courtesy to frown.
Khuhhkunk-ffppp. The sound of a book removed from a nearby shelf.
‘Quite the looker, wasn’t she?’ came Bielefeld’s voice from Winceworth’s other side.
‘What’s that?’ said Appleton, and he bent forward so that he could see across Winceworth’s desk. In this posture Winceworth could not help but notice that Appleton’s eye was very close to a number of pencils arranged in a pewter cup in front of him.
‘The fiancée: what’s-her-name,’ Bielefeld urged. ‘Did you manage to speak to her?’
‘I did not,’ said Appleton.
‘I did not,’ grieved Bielefeld.
‘I did,’ said Winceworth, but nobody paid him any mind. He was still staring at the pencils and their proximity to Appleton’s eye. One pencil in particular was just a matter of millimetres away.
‘I did not have the pleasure of speaking with her either. Very haughty, I thought.’ A rare female voice came from a desk behind them – one of the twin Cottingham sisters who worked at the dictionary. Winceworth knew that one of the sisters was an expert on Norse philology, the other an authority on the Goidelic branch of the Celtic languages, and they were identical but for the fact that one had entirely black hair and the other’s hair was entirely white. This was not a natural quirk, but one achieved through various dyes and oils, applied in order that some sense of individuality might be established. Indeed, the darker Miss Cottingham had once, unbidden, explained at length that she was convinced a commixture of rum and castor oil should be rubbed into the roots of one’s hair at night to promote growth and a healthy gloss. Perhaps because of this regime, the collar of her chemise was often stained as if with rust.
Winceworth had a theory – either nobody on the Swansby staff knew the twins’ individual Christian names or they did not care. During his five years at Swansby House, he had not once been introduced to either of the twins separately and he had not been confident enough to enquire. In his head he called them the Condiments whenever he had cause to speak to them, one being pepper-headed, the other salt.
There was a vile limerick about them scratched into the tiles in the bathrooms in the Scrivenery, the rhyme scheme of which used the word Ossianic with particular inventiveness.
Bielefeld and Appleton swivelled in their seats at the voice of the Cottingham, craning their necks. Half an inch closer and this action would have had Appleton’s eye out, Winceworth thought. He daydreamed a little. He imagined the eye plucked out and flicked directly into post boy Edmund’s wicker basket as he snaked between their desks.
‘Does she even speak English?’ Bielefeld pressed, and the Cottingham twin with the white hair came over to their desks, shrugging.
‘Who can say?’
‘Who can get a word in edgeways with Frasham?’ Appleton supplied, and all but Winceworth laughed a light, frank and tender laugh.
‘Hah hah hah,’ said Winceworth, very slowly and deliberately half a second after their titters had finished. Another Anglo-Saxon cloud scurried between their desks and Bielefeld pretended to be busy with some small chits on his freasquiscent desk. He put them in a pile, disordered them, then put them in a line again, miming an approximation of work.
‘I heard that she is related to the Tsar somehow,’ the Miss Cottingham continued.
Winceworth turned in his seat as Bielefeld and Appleton both said, ‘No!’ and ‘No?’
‘Not a daughter or a niece or anything,’ said the Condiment. ‘But perched somewhere in that family tree.’
‘You are pulling my leg,’ Appleton said.
‘If the tree’s big enough, I’m probably related to the Tsar too,’ scoffed Bielefeld.
‘And the Préfet of Timbuctoo,’ agreed Miss Cottingham, and they all laughed again.
‘But, you know, I really wouldn’t be surprised,’ said Bielefeld. ‘Frasham seems to move in all types of circles. A tsarina in our midst, imagine.’
‘I think Frasham mentioned she was from Irkutsk?’ the gossiping Appleton went on.
‘Yes, I’ve just been updating our entry for Irkutsk,’ Bielefeld said. ‘I thought it might come in handy if I was permitted to talk with her.’ Winceworth waited for the inevitable one-upmanship of trivia that Swansby researchers could never bear to not perform. ‘Did you know its coat of arms shows a beaver-like animal holding a sable-fox skin? Due to a mistranslation of the word babr, which in the local dialect meant a Siberian tiger! Babr became bobr, meaning beaver. Quite extraordinary.’
Stifling a yawn, Winceworth thought about his morning and tigerish imaginary Mr Grumps while Bielefeld and Appleton twirled back to their desks with eyebrows raised in appreciative silence. Winceworth picked up the topmost envelope in front of him and shook its letter free. He scanned the page. Its lettering was in a looping, brown ink with lots of underlining.
… enclosed, as directed, evidence of a number of words beginning with the letter S … One particularly arresting example from a recipe given to me by the Very Reverend … Although quite why the sultanas would be complemented by two-day-old rind in such a way remains entirely …
‘You know Frasham’s father was friends with Coleridge?’ came a hiss from the other Miss Cottingham behind them. Winceworth, Bielefeld and Appleton whirled in their seats once more, orbiting with the intractable tug of gossip.
‘You are pulling my other leg,’ said Appleton.
‘Well, there’s a thing!’
Looking Appleton directly in the face, Winceworth said, ‘You look just like a cafetière; I’ve often thought so.’ Again this went completely unnoticed.
‘Or was it Wordsworth?’ said Pepper-Cottingham. ‘One of the two. No, I’m sure it was Coleridge.’
‘I’ve just been writing up one of his – where is it—?’ Bielefeld flapped his papers along his desk, scrabbling and adding a frantic new pace of rustle to the Scrivenery’s hall. ‘Yes! Here! One of Coleridge’s first coinages—’ Bielefeld held up one of his blue index cards, face flushed with triumph. ‘Soul-mate, noun!’ His cry caused a flush of Shhh!s to ripple across the room. Correspondingly, the group’s voices sank. ‘“You must have a Soul-mate as well as a House-or a Yoke-mate,”’ he quoted. ‘You see: there! First used in Coleridge’s letters.’ Bielefeld had the smile of a Master of the Hunt, Winceworth observed.
‘I caught an early use of supersensuous in one of his articles just yesterday,’ said Salt-Cottingham. A competitive edge crept into her voice.
‘How wonderful.’ Appleton paused, then added with the flourish of an Ace across baize, ‘Of course, it was in Coleridge’s papers that I netted – now, what was it – ah, yes, astrognosy and mysticism some months ago. And I was rather pleased to catch his deployment of romanticise over the summer.’
‘Don’t forget narcissism,’ Winceworth said. ‘Noun.’
Three faces turned to him.
‘I’m sorry, Winceworth,’ Miss Cottingham said, ‘did you say something?’
‘Only—’ Appleton looked at his pewter cup of pencils, then at the ceiling, then at Miss Cottingham and Bielefeld for camaraderie before settling back on Winceworth. ‘Well, you know, the old lisp, ah! It’s sometimes difficult to—’
‘I’ve often said,’ Bielefeld spoke up, ‘that if Coleridge’s maxim holds true, and poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, lexicographers are doubly so, hidden in plain sight.’
‘Oh, very good!’ Appleton said, and Miss Cottingham gave an abrupt clap of her hands.
‘That was – that was Shelley, I think—’ Winceworth said, but at that point one of the innumerable Scrivenery cats jumped up onto his desk.
‘Oops!’ said Appleton.
‘To what do we owe the pleasure!’ said Bielefeld.
‘Steady there!’ said Miss Cottingham.
The cat looked at Winceworth, right into the heart of him. He extended a hand. Without breaking eye contact, the cat reversed a couple of steps, paused and then, protractedly and calmly, coughed something hairy and pelleted and faintly damp over Winceworth’s paperwork and into his lap.
Appleton and Bielefeld’s chairs squealed against the floor in their haste to push away and Shhhhh!s filled the air of the Scrivenery once more.